Study also raises concerns about deadlines and reliability, but lead author finds reasons to be optimistic
By John Mooney
With less than nine months and counting, New Jersey’s rollout of a statewide teacher evaluation system is moving ahead, but the deadlines are tight, reliability remains an issue — and the system has yet to win the confidence of the teachers it’s intended to evaluate.
That was the bottom line of a sweeping report by a team of Rutgers researchers that is following the early implementation of the system.
According to the state’s new tenure law, every district must have a revamped evaluation system in place by next school year.
The cautions and caveats of the report were tempered by the fact that the study was only looking at the first 10 pilot districts in their first year (2011-2012). Another 20 districts are in a second-year pilot that will be reported on this summer.
The report also did not delve into a central piece of the new process: the use of student achievement scores as a significant part of the evaluation.
Still, there were some sobering findings. For instance, just one-third of the teachers in the first-year pilot thought the system accurately measured their classroom performance.
The approval rate was twice as high among administrators.
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